"Colourless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his feet touched the ground and headed by Omar, we all rushed towards him. He was a very tall, loosely-built man, his complexion almost white with just a yellowish tinge, colourless lips, colourless drab hair; vague irregular features, with an entire absence of expression. He wore an Arab haick upon his head bound with many yards of brown camel's hair, a long white garment, something like a burnouse, only embroidered at the edge ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... serious consideration the difficulties that lay in their path in the New World they were seeking. Probably, considering the land they were leaving was one of volcanoes and desert wastes, they hoped for better things. Their Icelandic life must indeed be hard and colourless, so hard as to have taken from them all pleasure in existence. To judge by their apathy, these questions did not seem to have been taken much into account by them; possibly when the sight of green fields, and Nature's ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... the way, and tripping up himself and others. His hands too had a flabby and inefficient expression, and his knees were set at a wrong angle. His stature was insignificant, his colouring vague; longish hair and beard of a colourless grey matched the grey of his prophetic and ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... evidently been shedding tears. He felt his heart beat hard—he seemed now to touch her secret. She continued to look at him with a clouded brow, as if his return had surrounded her with complications too great to be disguised by a colourless welcome. For some moments, as he turned and walked beside her, neither spoke; then abruptly, "Tell me truly, Mr. Longmore," she said, "why you've come back." He inclined himself to her, almost pulling up again, with an air that startled her into a ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... act of combination the properties of elements (except weight) disappear, and are superseded by others in the compound. If, for example, mercury (a heavy, silvery liquid) be heated in contact with oxygen (a colourless gas), oxide of mercury is formed (red precipitate, which is a powder). This compound presents very different phenomena from those of its elements; and hence Mill called this class of cases "the heteropathic intermixture of effects." Still, in chemical ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... figure. But after a little while curves appeared; long delicate outlines began to emerge as rounded surfaces in monochrome, casting definite shadows on other surfaces. She could recognise the shape of a human head; saw it gradually become a colourless drawing; saw shoulders, arms, a body emerging into shadowy shape; saw the long fine limbs appear, the ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... incomprehensible, opening out with all that inexplicable quality of design that, for example, some great piece of music, some symphony of Beethoven's, conveys. We see future beyond future and past behind past. It has been like the coming of dawn, at first a colourless dawn, clear and spacious, before which the mists whirl and fade, and there opens to our eyes not the narrow passage, the definite end we had imagined, but the rocky, ill-defined path we follow high amidst this limitless prospect of space and time. At first the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... letters 'OSTEND,' standing in the darkness. Everybody was hurrying with a blind, insect-like intentness through the dark grey air, porters were calling in un-English English, then trotting with heavy bags, their colourless blouses looking ghostly as they disappeared; Ursula stood at a long, low, zinc-covered barrier, along with hundreds of other spectral people, and all the way down the vast, raw darkness was this low stretch of open bags and spectral people, whilst, on the other ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... usual steadiness, began to weaken, and upon consulting the barometer I found that the mercury was falling rather rapidly. At the same time I became aware that the aspect of the firmament was undergoing a subtle change, the clear, brilliant blue of the sky gradually fading to a colourless pallor, as though a succession of veils of white gauze was being drawn across it, while the clouds, sailing up out of the north-east, paused in their flight and began to bank up in the south-west quarter. These changes continued throughout the afternoon, the result being that the sun ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... at her puckered, pathetic face, suddenly colourless save for dark rings round the big, hollow eyes. Then he sat down and drew her to him, patting her hand and talking to her half as if she were a child, half as though she were capable of understanding ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... Aram perceived how intent was the hush and suspense of her emotions. But when she caught his eye—that eye which even at such a moment beamed unutterable love, pity, regret for her—a wild, a convulsive smile of encouragement, of anticipated triumph, broke the repose of her colourless features, and suddenly dying away, left her lips apart, in that expression which the great masters of old, faithful to Nature, give alike to the struggle of hope and the ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... clasped nothing. When thin transverse slices of the two are placed under the microscope their difference is conspicuous: the side of the petiole which has been in contact with the support, is formed of a layer of colourless cells with their longer axes directed from the centre, and these are very much larger than the corresponding cells in the opposite or unchanged petiole; the central cells, also, are in some degree enlarged, and ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... can only be feebly suggested. The sky overhead was of an intense ultramarine hue, approaching in depth to indigo, gradually changing, as the eye travelled downward from the zenith toward the horizon, to a pallid colourless hue. The stars—excepting those near the horizon—were almost as distinctly visible as at midnight; whilst the sun, shorn of his rays, hung in the sky like a great ball of molten copper; the moon also, reduced to a thin silver thread-like crescent, had followed the sun ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... as realism and romance is sheer waste of time. It is but a recrudescence of the old classic vs. romantic conflict. Stendhal has written that a classicist is a dead romanticist. It still holds good. But here in America, "the colourless shadow land of fiction," is there no tragedy in Gilead for souls not supine? Some years ago Mr. James Lane Allen, who cannot be accused of any hankerings after the flesh-pots of Zola, made an energetic protest against what ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... of about thirty, with somewhat sallow cheeks on which there was now a hectic flush, a high-pitched forehead that seemed to have contracted into a perpetual frown, and colourless eyes. The son of a well-known barrister, he had tried his luck in the City after leaving Cambridge. In a few years the respectable income he had started with had dwindled under the drain of his speculations, and it was then that a friend ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... first, and as you prove its effects, then you shall reward me accordingly,' said Minetta, producing a bottle with a colourless liquid from under her cloak. She poured out some of the liquid on a sponge, and held it to the mouth of the hag. In a few moments its effects were indeed perceptible; her eyes closed, her arms hung down, and she was in ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... a summer night, I walk by Ullswater. The sky is still warm with the afterglow of sunset, a dusky crimson smouldering above the dark mountain line. Below me spreads a long reach of the lake, steel- grey between its dim colourless shores. In the profound stillness, the trotting of a horse beyond the water sounds strangely near; it serves only to make more sensible the repose of Nature in this her sanctuary. I feel a solitude unutterable, yet nothing akin to desolation; the heart of the land I love seems ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... are colourless and lifeless—sort of plastic stuff—until we get hold of them. We twist them to the best shapes we can. Nothing happens to us that isn't exactly like ourselves. Even what people call accidents. Even a man's diseases. I've seen that ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... and now as he walked up the silent road he still bewailed, the fate that had called him to such an uneventful life as a pedagogue's. What a prosaic existence he led, so stagnant, so colourless! Secure, methodical, year in year out, what call was there for bravery? He thought enviously of those roving, mediaeval days, so near and so remote, of quests and spies and condottieri and many a risky blade-drawing business. And suddenly came a doubt, a strange doubt, springing ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... breakfast-table. But D'Arragon was looking at Mathilde, who had gone rather hurriedly to the window, as if to breathe the air. He had caught a glimpse of her face as she passed. It was hard and set, quite colourless, with bright, sleepless eyes. D'Arragon was a sailor. He had seen that look in rougher faces and sterner eyes, ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... treated of abstract questions, whilst of life he knew absolutely nothing. He had a great admiration for me, mingled with a trifle of awe. My little court had surnamed him "La Quenelle." He was long, vacillating, colourless, and really did resemble the thin roll of forcemeat in ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... prosper in it. I honestly believe I may safely take out a license to amuse myself. But it isn't that I think of, any more than I dream of, playing with suffering. Pleasure and pain are empty words to me; what I long for is knowledge—some other knowledge than comes to us in formal, colourless, impersonal precept. You would understand all this better if you could breathe for an hour the musty in-door atmosphere in which I have always lived. To break a window and let in light and air—I feel as if at last I ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... had, I am thankful to say, strength enough to resist the temptation thus adroitly thrust upon me. Setting down the cup, I pointed to the badge of blue ribbon, which, though damp and colourless, remained faithful to my button-hole. I also made signs I was hungry, and would be glad of something to eat. My gestures, as far as the blue ribbon went, must have been thrown away, of course, but any one could understand that I was fainting from hunger. ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... early mornings, when the air is chilly, but later on it becomes a lively place, full of laughter and splashings. Here, for a sou, you may get the boys to jump down from the parapet and wallow among the muddy ooze at the bottom; the liquid, though transparent, is not colourless, but rather of the blue-green tint of the aquamarine crystal; it flows rapidly, and all impurities ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... circle; more frequently through depression or sorrow, which gives men a longing for some keen pleasure in which they can forget themselves; or through the jaded habit of mind and body which excessive work produces, or through the dreary, colourless, joyless surroundings of sordid poverty. Drink and the sensual pleasures, if viciously indulged, produce (doubtless through physical causes) an intense craving for their gratification. This, however, is not the case with all our pleasures. Many are ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... may gaze with perfect license—that veil which has just been lifted to the brow, it will never be dropt again—but we do not gaze with perfect impunity; we turn from the lovely shadow with knees how prone to bend! And as to the sculptor, on condition that he hold to the pure colourless marble, is he not permitted to reveal the sacred charms of Venus herself? Every art is hers. Go to the theatre, and whether it be tragedy, or comedy, or opera, or dance, the attraction of woman is the very life of all that is transacted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... again. The great wealth of her hair looked very dark above her colourless face. She raised her eyes, glistening softly in the light with a sort of unreadable appeal, with a ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... attentively at her, as she put that singular question to me. It was then nearly one o'clock. All I could discern distinctly by the moonlight was a colourless, youthful face, meagre and sharp to look at about the cheeks and chin; large, grave, wistfully attentive eyes; nervous, uncertain lips; and light hair of a pale, brownish-yellow hue. There was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner: it was quiet and self-controlled, a little melancholy ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... colourless, and ill-fitting dressing gown, without a girdle and flopping about untidily. Wear long black curly hair to shoulder. Put plenty of grease on. Then knock handle off a round-bottomed saucepan, very ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... bird is singing by the pond, And all about him stars have burst in bloom, A colonnade stands pallidly beyond, And beneath that a solitary tomb. Who lies within that tomb I do not know, The yellow bird intones his threnody In notes as colourless as driven snow, Clashing with the green hush and out ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... no breeze was astir, all was colourless and still ... but the nearness of the awakening could be felt, and the rarer air smelt keen and ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... again he made the best of his unaided way, staggering among the stones, and wading in low growth of the calcanthus, where the rattlesnakes lay hissing at his passage. Yet I liked to draw water. It was pleasant to dip the grey metal pail into the clean, colourless, cool water; pleasant to carry it back, with the water lipping at the edge, and a broken ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had Benham, appeared more impressive, more perfectly finished and turned out; never had he appeared so near to his tailor and so far from his audience. He was a handsome man in his rather colourless fashion, a man who would look any part with distinction from policeman to President. His sleek iron-gray hair had as usual the rich sheen of velvet; his thin, sharp profile was like the face on a Roman coin. A man of power, of intellect, of character; ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... loved you. Alas, this is to say little! All my thoughts had you for their centre. I was your slave. With you I could encounter tenfold calamity, and call it happiness. Banished from you, the world was a colourless and confused chaos. One moment of displeasure, one interval of ambiguous silence crouded my imagination with every frantic apprehension. One smile, one word of soft and soothing composition, fell upon my soul like odoriferous balm, was a dulcet and harmonious sound, that soothed my ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... in the highway, dropped my beautiful companion's arm, and stood gazing intently in her face, as if I would read her most inmost thoughts through those windows of the soul, her serene, mild, tender, blue eyes. I saw that the face was colourless, and that the beautiful lips, out of which the words that had alarmed me more by their accents than their direct signification, were quivering in a way that their lovely mistress could not control. Tears, as large as heavy ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... his glass with him, rose and stepped across the strip of grass to her side, and, glancing askance at her, was on the point of speaking when he discovered that her eyes were shut and her face colourless and rigid. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... October tints of strong ruby and tawny wines. The sun seemed to set each object alight with a different coloured flame, like a man lighting fireworks; and even Innocent's hair, which was of a rather colourless fairness, seemed to have a flame of pagan gold on it as he strode across the lawn towards the ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... the beach, she swept a swift searching glance over the few girls sitting or lying on the sand; then her eyes rested on a little shrinking figure standing like a small blue post, knee deep in the water. It was Elizabeth, her cheeks colourless, her eyes fixed beseechingly, imploringly, on Olga's face. In a flash Olga was beside her, ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... breakfast, and Mullins was beginning to clear away, when a stormy step was heard upon the stairs, and in burst Mr. Upton with a panic-stricken face. He was colourless almost to the neck, but he denied that he had any news, though not without a pregnant glance at Mullins, and fell to abusing London and the Londoners, but City men above all others, till Thrush and he should be alone together. The incidental ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... Lounsbury caught the clear outline of her firmly drawn face. Beside her, Marylyn, slight and colourless, was for the moment eclipsed. The hat of the elder girl was brushed back, displaying a forehead upon which shone the very spirit of the unshackled. Her hands, large, yet not too large for the splendid figure of which they were the instruments, were ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... is indeed the invariable consequence of weakness, for the love of vulgar popularity was the weakness of our eminent chief, so deeply respected on other accounts. This same weakness caused him to end his days as a Deputy of the most colourless opinions. ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... excuse for his insistence on this point, for in a superficial way Romer was very effective, fair and good-looking, well-made and distinguished; but the entire absence of all expression from his empty, regular face, and of all animation from his dry, colourless voice and manner, soon counteracted the effectiveness. Valentia often said that Romer should never do more than walk through a room or look in for a few minutes where there were other people—even at a club—and then go ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... about my table, "you shall hear the latest beautiful thing and bold, said by our great Henry—'capable de tout,' beside whom 'ce coquin d'Habacuc' was mild indeed and usual!" And straightway to my stultification, I find myself translating paragraphs of pathos and indignation, in which a colourless old gentleman of the Academy is sympathized with, and made a doddering hero of, for no better reason than that he is old—and those who would point out the wisdom and comfort of his withdrawal into the wigwam of private life, sternly reproved and anathematized ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... this morning to find the blow quite ended. The heaven was all a mottled grey; even the East quite colourless. The downward slope of the island veiled in wafts of vapour, blue like smoke; not a leaf stirred on the tallest tree. Only three miles below me on the barrier reef I could see the individual breakers curl and fall, and ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... half-consciously closed one hand. It seemed to him an almost intolerable thing that this girl should waste her youth and sweetness dragging out a life of unremitting toil in the lone Bush. Still, while her father lived, there was nothing else she could look forward to, and he could imagine how the long colourless years would roll away with her, while she lost her freshness and grew hard and worn with petty cares and labour that needed a stronger arm than hers. She might grow discontented, he fancied, and perhaps a trifle bitter, though he could not ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... their complements in another body, and find that they yoke easily with the borrowed team. When my hand aches from overtouching, I find relief in the sight of another. When my mind lags, wearied with the strain of forcing out thoughts about dark, musicless, colourless, detached substance, it recovers its elasticity as soon as I resort to the powers of another mind which commands light, harmony, colour. Now, if the five senses will not remain disassociated, the life of the deaf-blind ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... overexcitable every stimulus is raised in the spectrum scale of colours. Thus, violet becomes red. An exactly opposite effect is observed when the retina is torpid.[35] Certain poisons are known to affect the quality of the colour-impression. Thus, santonin, when taken in any quantity, makes all colourless objects look yellow. Severe pathological disturbances are known to involve, in addition to hyperaesthesia and anaesthesia, what, has been called paraesthesia, that is to say, that condition in which the quality of sensation is greatly changed. Thus, for ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... under a sufficiently high microscopic power, there will be seen, among the innumerable multitude of little, circular, discoidal bodies, or corpuscles, which float in it and give it its colour, a comparatively small number of colourless corpuscles, of somewhat larger size and very irregular shape. If the drop of blood be kept at the temperature of the body, these colourless corpuscles will be seen to exhibit a marvellous activity, changing ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... wit could not fathom the mystery of Toni's new joy in life. When interrogated concerning her employers, Toni was always vague. That there were two of them Fanny knew; but from Toni's extremely colourless description, Miss Gibbs gathered that neither was at all what the girls called interesting; and Mr. Rose, at least, almost middle-aged. (Heaven knows what flight of fancy on the part of Toni—Toni, whose magic romance was ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... God had crossed his path. From dawn until dusk he had seen nothing living or moving but one pale lizard, almost colourless as the rocks from which it had come; it had scurried across his path, the sole inhabitant of the untrodden sands, alarmed at the ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... even smaller than the Warden and quite the most prim-looking man I have ever beheld. His face was colourless and smooth, and as I sat opposite him in his gloomy room he looked so tidy and sure of himself that I found a great difficulty in speaking to him. Having said the usual things he was very obviously expecting ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... down from his stool. His face was almost colourless, but for two bright red spots, the size of quarters, beneath either cheek-bone. He was half a head shorter than the shipping clerk, and apparently about half as wide; but there was sincerity in his manner and an ominous snap in the unflinching stare ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... saw a creature dark and colourless, yet splendidly alive. She knew him by heart, every detail of him, the hair, close-cropped, that left clean the full backward curve of his head; his face with its patches of ash and bistre; his eyes, hazel, lucid, intent, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... was dimly lighted by a lamp turned low. By the bedside sat Grace, wrapped in a shawl; on the pillow lay the white face of Agnes Darling, calm in her slumber, but colourless as the ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... there was a scared sort of appeal in the woman's eyes as they travelled, slowly, over her face. But there was not even appeal in the tone of her voice—it was all a drab, colourless monotone. ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... were colourless and shimmering in the heat. The harbour was calm and greeny-blue. One by one, with our haversacks and water-bottles, belts and rolled overcoats, we went down the companion-way into the waiting surf-boats. Again and again these boats, roped ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... the cottage, when there emerged from the half-open door the same attenuated creature whom I had seen in the morning. I could perceive now that he was a man of sixty, wrinkled, bent, and feeble, with sparse, grizzled hair, and long, colourless face. With a cringing, sidelong gait, he shuffled toward his companion, who was unconscious of his approach until he was close upon him. His light footfall or his breathing may have finally given notice of his proximity, for the worker sprang round and faced him. Each made a ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hostess with paternal playfulness, and the young man with an ease which might have been acquired on the Stock Exchange and in the dressing-rooms of "leading ladies." He spoke a faultless, colourless English, from which one felt he might pass with equal mastery to half a dozen other languages. He enquired patronizingly for the excellent Hubbards, asked his hostess if she did not mean to give him a drop of tea and ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... contradictions, no gaps in the sequence of ideas? In practice, when the continuators or interpolators have been men of well-marked personality and decided views, analysis will separate the original from the additions as cleanly as a pair of scissors. When the whole is written in a level, colourless style, the lines of division are not so easy to see; it is then better to confess the fact than ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... ancient and tattered bed which not even the activities of Mme. Poussette could render more than moderately decent. The sands of life were running out indeed; a great change was apparent in his pinched and freckled features, and his small colourless eyes had sunk entirely back into his head. Two large cats slept at his feet and three more lay under the bed; despite all madame could do to remove them, these five out of the fourteen persisted in returning again and again to the ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... Methuen having done his part, all eyes were now turned towards the Natal force and Sir Redvers Buller, in expectation of relief. In England the tension was becoming painful; in the Cape it was causing colourless loyalty to become tinged with doubt; in the besieged towns it was bringing patience to the snapping-point. In effect, the whole nation was standing with bated breath for the great, the important stroke, and the entire world looked to Colenso, that hitherto ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... and her colourless younger sister, Anne, the latter now long dead, had settled down at Beechfield in the nineties of the last century. When both over thirty years of age, they had selected Beechfield as a dwelling-place because of its quiet charm and nearness ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... that all this brought, to scatter it at her will; for she was sure that she had not a better heart than other girls of her age. But she had never seen it. The reality of her own life was too weak and colourless, by contrast, to make the name of fortune an excuse for the sordid facts of meanness. There was no splendour about her, no wild gaiety, none of the glorious extravagance of conscious young wealth, and there was very little amusement to divert her ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... [Footnote: The use of the word "sailor" was long regarded with disfavour by the Navy Board, who saw in it only a colourless substitute for the good old terms "seaman" and "mariner." Capt. Bertie, of the Ruby gunship, once reported the pressing of a "sailor," Thomas Letting by name, out of a collier in Yarmouth Roads, and was called upon by My Lords to define the new-fangled ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... and undeveloped. She was seventeen and looked hardly fifteen. Her large dark eyes looked pathetic in her thin sallow face. Her lips were thin and colourless, her hair straight and dull brown. No prettiness at all belonged to her. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... was a widower; a niece of his late wife generally lived with him and superintended his domestic affairs—an elderly person, colourless and cold, who, however, had a proper sense of her position as a decayed relative on the wife's side, and made him negatively comfortable; she was away just then, which was partly the reason why Mark had been invited ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... is not equal to the promise. You must never feel nor shew the faintest interest in the work reviewed, that would be fatal. Never praise heartily, that is the sign of an intelligence not mediocre. Be vague, colourless, and languid, this deters readers from approaching the book. If you have glanced at it, blame it for not being what it never professed to be; if it is a treatise on Greek Prosody, censure the lack of humour; if it is a volume of gay verses, lament the author's indifference ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... quiet since the beginning of the War. The old, light-hearted, exaggerated speech had gone from him, and when he spoke, his words were abrupt and colourless. He took his place at the end of the file of men, and as he did so, the man in front of him, a fringe-haired, quick-eyed youth with a muffler round his neck, turned and greeted him. "'Illoa, myte!" he said with the ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... strange above the straw; and further on were some Germans, whom the French authorities would not allow our men to touch; then rows of men of every colour and blood; Zouaves, with their picturesque dress all grimed and colourless; Turcos, French, and Belgians. Nearly all had their heads and hands bound up in filthy dressings. We went into the dressing-station at the far end of the great shed and dressed wounds till about 3 o'clock, then we passed through the long long lines ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... sought to better his position, wishing to have an individuality of his own in her regard; but he could not change the colourless role which she assigned him. So he became silent, speaking only when some remark was obviously intended for him, and watched her face and expression. He had always told himself that her dominant characteristic was strength, power of will, endurance; but now ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... loosed the shatter'd casque, and chafed his hands, And call'd him by his name, complaining loud, And dropping bitter tears against a brow Striped with dark blood: for all his face was white And colourless, and like the withered moon Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east; And all his greaves and cuisses dash'd with drops Of onset; and the light and lustrous curls— That made his forehead like a rising sun High from the dias-throne—were ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... a queer little fellow, healthy but colourless, with strangely beautiful grey eyes which, on first seeing them, almost startled one with their intelligence. He was shy and almost obstinately silent, but when I talked to him on certain subjects the intense suppressed interest he felt would show itself ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... Jeannette declared, pointing to them where Susette had spread them out upon the bed, "are just colourless baby things ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... Whig. The first, with its bold assertion of the Divine Right of Sovereignty, was that which commended itself to every loyal clergyman on his promotion; and unfavourable conclusions were drawn with regard to the civil sentiments of the man who preferred the colourless alternative. As in the Church, so in our educational system. Oxford, with its Caroline and Jacobite traditions, was the Tory University; Cambridge, the nursing mother of Whigs; Eton was supposed to cherish a sentiment of romantic affection for ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... treading on the colourless grass of the pasture land, we had to work round the Kolla fiord, a longer way but an easier one than across that inlet. We soon entered into a 'pingstar' or parish called Ejulberg, from whose steeple twelve o'clock would have struck, if Icelandic churches were rich ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... bureau. In a moment after she came out with a more luminous expression upon her face than Robert had ever seen it bear. It was as still as ever, but there was a strange light in her eyes, which was not confined to her eyes, but shone in a measure from her colourless forehead and cheeks as well. It was long before Robert was able to interpret that change in her look, and that increase of kindness towards himself and Shargar, apparently such a contrast with the ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... all the next, while the gale still blew, my sister was nervous and downcast, often at the window, often on the heads, forever sighing as she went about the work of the house. And when I saw her thus distraught and colourless—no warm light in her eyes—no bloom on her dimpled cheeks—no merry smile lurking about the corners of her sweet mouth—I was fretted beyond description; and I determined this: that when the doctor got back from Wreck Cove I should report her case to him, whether she liked ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... answer, his grave countenance expressed nothing but stern decision. His friend's face was colourless, motionless, and growing cold. He raised Bobo's hand and let it drop as he ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... continually, as if it were keeping time to an inaudible tune, as she sat there stiffly erect. Her skin was pale and withered; and her cheeks were wrinkled in fine lines, like the crossings of a cobweb. Her eyes might once have been blue; but they had become nearly colourless, and, looking at her, one might easily imagine that she was blind. She had a singularly sweet smile, and a musical voice, which though sad, had no trace of whining. If it had not been for her smile and her voice, I think madam would have been a terror to me. ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... instincts, my vague suspicions, suddenly took shape and centred upon the naturalist. In that impassive, colourless man, with his straw hat and his butterfly-net, I seemed to see something terrible—a creature of infinite patience and craft, with a smiling face ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... countenance, though singularly emaciated, still retained traces of youth. His hair, which he wore very long, descended over his shoulders, and must originally have been of a light golden colour, but now was severely touched with grey. His countenance was very pallid, so colourless indeed that its aspect was almost unearthly; but his large blue eyes, that were deeply set in his majestic brow, still glittered with fire, and their expression alone gave life to a visage, which, though singularly beautiful in its outline, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... otherwise for the glamour as of envied privilege and strange experience that surrounded the Wards; they mixed, to the great sharpening of the edge of their wit, in the wild life of the people, beside which the life at Mr. Pulling Jenks's and even at the Institution Vergnes was colourless and commonplace. Somehow they were of the people, and still were full of family forms—which seemed, one dimly made out through the false perspective of all the cousinships, the stronger and clearer note of New England; the note that had already determined a shy yearning under perusal ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... she found us like our sea, Of aspect colourless and chill, Rock-girt; like it she found us still Deep at our ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... then all was silent again. While thus the hours went slowly by, his attention was attracted by a bright light in the sky. It appeared as if part of the heavens were reflecting some strong glare from beneath, for as he looked, the light, at first pale and colourless, gradually deepened into a rich mellow hue, and at length, through the murky blackness of the night, a strong clear current of flame rose steadily upwards from the earth, and pointed towards the sky. ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... my glance swept the table for Jessy, and I saw that she was sitting perfectly still and colourless, crumbling a small piece of bread, while her eyes clung to the basket of roses ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... in his kind, cheerful voice, trying to encourage her, for her face and lips were colourless, and she was trembling as with a sudden chill. He put one arm round her, and came forward to look ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... and shining; the clypeus yellow, produced in front; the sides of the face depressed; the ocelli prominent and reddish. Thorax very smooth and shining; the wings colourless and iridescent, their extreme base yellowish, the nervures and stigma brown, the tegulae pale testaceous-yellow; the posterior tibiae with a scopa of glittering white hairs, the tarsi ferruginous and with glittering hairs. Abdomen, from the third segment to the apex, ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... is very conveniently prepared by passing acetylene into cooled bromine, has a density of 3.001 at 6 C. It is highly convenient, since it is colourless, odourless, very stable and easily mobile. It may be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... and looked up at the powerful, nobly-proportioned form, the grand, kingly face, calm and colourless, the large, searching black eyes, within whose baffling depths lay all the mysteries of mesmerism, and a spasm of pain seized her own features. She shaded ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the walnut fruit and the root are used for dyeing brown. The husks to be used for dyeing must be collected green and fresh, then covered with water and kept from the light to prevent them oxidizing. In the walnut tree there is an astringent colourless substance which gives a greenish yellow dye. This has the property of absorbing oxygen from the air and turning dark brown. It is only the unoxidized pale greenish stuff that can act as the dye, the dark brown itself has no affinity for the wool. Acids should ...
— Vegetable Dyes - Being a Book of Recipes and Other Information Useful to the Dyer • Ethel M. Mairet
... Gertrude, the blood, for the first time since her re-appearance on deck, rushing into her colourless cheeks, until they appeared charged to fulness. "I like not the wretches who would be ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... ocean and burying life and sunshine in its fatal folds, or like the ever-flowing river, or like the fall plunging over the edge of the cliff, or like the motions of the midnight sky. Each moment in its turn passes into the colourless stony past, and the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... rocks were growing visible again, and he saw a very bright star that he knew must be Lucifer rising amidst the black branches. He was sitting upon a rock at the foot of a slender-stemmed leafless tree. He had been asleep, and it was daybreak. Everything was coldly clear and colourless. ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... I examined him more critically. Then I noticed several things about him, that, at first, had escaped my notice. They were these: (one) that although he was mounted he was wearing walking clothes—he had on long trousers and thick, clumsy boots; (two) that his ears and neck were perfectly colourless, of an unnatural and startling white; (three) that despite the incongruity of his attire, no one but myself seemed to see him. On he rode, neither looking to the left nor to the right, until he came to Sutton ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... to grape must, in the proportion of 100 grains to a litre (2.1 pints), or if very much inclined to ferment, more charcoal was used. When the liquid had settled, and become clear and colourless, it was removed from the charcoal, and put into bottles or casks, to be closed up, and preserved. It will not enter into fermentation, even in close vessels; for the charcoal has absorbed the ferment. Nevertheless, the ferment has ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... being the clearest water I had ever seen; it was quite colourless, and though of great depth, even here at its source, the bottom was distinctly visible from the boat. It was a grand river, large and deep enough to ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... in the room for an instant—longer perhaps—then all was still again, and Florence, with her face quite colourless but smiling, held his head upon her arm. Her arm ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... and after going a few yards regained the command of his legs. He sucked an orange as he walked. It was a colourless and pellucid dawn. The wood of pines detached its columns of brown trunks and its dark-green canopy very clearly against the rocks of the gray hillside behind. He kept his eyes fixed on it steadily. That temperamental, good-humoured coolness in ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... other groups and which are not adapted to the horizontal position of the original median plane of symmetry. The principal adaptive characters are: both eyes and the pigmentation on the side which is uppermost in the natural position, lower side without eyes and colourless; dorsal and ventral fins continuous and extending nearly the whole length of the dorsal and ventral edges; dorsal fin extending forwards on the head, not along the morphological median line, which is between the eyes, but between the more dorsal eye and the lower side of the body, ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... too late—Oh God, that cry!—I was stunned and drowning, a chaos of wreck was beneath me, and around me, and above me, and blue agonized gasping faces, and struggling arms, and colourless clutching hands, and despairing yells for help, where help was impossible; when I felt a sharp bite on the neck, and breathed again. My Newfoundland dog, Sneezer, had snatched at me, and dragged me out of the eddy of ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... he was able to take any nourishment. So he set the professor to work, warming some chicken broth over a spirit lamp, and mixing a little champagne and soda-water in one glass and brandy and water in another. Meanwhile, he filled a hypodermic syringe with colourless fluid out of a little stoppered bottle, and then turned the sheet down and injected the contents of the syringe under the smooth, bronze skin of the Inca's shoulder. He moved slightly at the prick of the needle, then he drew two or three deep breaths, and suddenly sat ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... consists of urates; this is uric acid in combination with alkalies. In man, in addition to the urea excreted, there is also a little hippuric and uric acid or compounds of these. Uric acid is a transparent colourless crystalline body almost insoluble in water but soluble as urates in the presence of alkalies. As deposited from urine it is of a dull red sand-like appearance, as it has a great affinity for any ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... as before, the voice that said, "Thank you," was colourless, while her eyes rested upon the ubiquitous Nick, who had entered with an armful of wood and was intent upon making ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... projected forward at the heavy brows, sloped backwards in the direction of the summit. The large black eyes were deep and hollow, and there were broad rings of dark colour around them, so that they seemed strangely thrown into relief above the sunken, colourless cheeks. Marzio's nose was long and pointed, very straight, and descending so suddenly from the forehead as to make an angle with the latter the reverse of the one most common in human faces. Seen in profile, the brows formed the most prominent point, ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... she had a dim perception of something lurking there. The red of the fire grew deeper and deeper, grey scales spread upon it, its vertical column of smoke became more and more visible, and up and down the gorge things that had been unseen grew clear in a colourless illumination. She may ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... first car and they captured a bench for two, and sat in happy isolation while the train swayed and roared along through rich fields and languid tree-clumps. The haze of the morning had become a sort of clear tremor over everything, like the colourless vibration about a flame; and the opulent landscape seemed to droop under it. But to Charity the heat was a stimulant: it enveloped the whole world in the same glow that burned at her heart. Now and then a lurch of the ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... own honestly that I could have jumped into the vehicle and kissed my dear grandmother's still good-looking but colourless cheeks, and hugged Patt, and possibly some of the others, to my heart. Uncle Ro had more command of himself; though I could see that the sound of his venerable parent's voice, in which the tremour was barely perceptible, was ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... keenly, and quite prepared. A few words to Frank resulted in a small glass of water being placed in his hand in company with a bottle and graduated measure; a small quantity of a colourless fluid was transferred to the glass, and the Hakim rose and walked with dignified pace to where the two chiefs stood, the younger scowling fiercely now as he saw that his companion was beginning to totter upon his legs and swaying slightly as ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... seventeen years of age; rather under the middle height, slenderly formed, with an appearance of great fragility and delicacy; her complexion is very fair, of that extreme fairness which often betokens disease, and her face almost colourless. Her features are regular, and classical in their contour; her eyes are a clear grey— honest, truthful eyes, that look straight at you; and her hair, which is almost long enough, when let down, to touch her feet, is of that pale golden ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... forms, and it is easy to see that he banished these purely constructional syllables from his verse because they took up room which he thought he could not afford them: he needed in his scheme all his space for his poetical words, and he wished those to crowd out every merely gram- matical colourless or toneless element; and so when he had got into the habit of doing without these relative pronouns—though he must, I suppose, have supplied them in his thought,—he abuses the licence beyond precedent, as when he writes (no. ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... most remarkable of all about an orchid is that this marvel of colour and form and of texture of fabric unfolds itself from within a most ungainly, unsightly, unlikely-looking tuber. From shapeless, colourless tubers, which attach themselves to trunks and branches of trees and cling on to rocks, there emerge these peerless aristocrats of the flower-world, finished, polished, immaculate, and reigning supreme through sheer distinction and excellence at every point—and ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... of independence, girls of that class are used to the feeling of being specially protected, as, in fact, they are. This feeling accounts for nine tenths of their audacious gestures. Her face had gone completely colourless. Ghastly. Fancy having it brought home to her so brutally that she was the sort of person who must run away from the police! I believe she was pale with indignation, mostly, though there was, of course, also the concern for her intact personality, a vague dread of some sort of rudeness. And, naturally, ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... she who sat at Marie's feet, was a blonde of slender build and bourgeoise appearance, some thirty and odd years of age, and faded before she had grown old. She shrank back, scarcely occupying any room, wearing a dark dress, and showing colourless hair, and a long grief-stricken face which expressed unlimited self-abandonment, infinite sadness. The woman in front of her, she who sat on the same seat as Pierre, was of the same age, but belonged to the working classes. She wore a black cap and displayed a face ravaged ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Hubert never forgot Diana leaped to her feet, her face colourless, and her lips framed the word "Ahmed," though no sound came from them. She was shaking all over, and the Vicomte put his arm round her instinctively. She clung to him, and he knew with a bitter certainty that the support of a table or a ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... give to the age the basis of a natural mode of feeling, thought, and life, upon which Art prospers in its purest form. In many respects the age itself was in this favourable to the Poet. It maintained a happy medium between crudeness and a vitiated taste: life was not insipid and colourless, as it is nowadays: men still ventured to appear what they were; there was still poetry in reality. Our German poets, in an age of rouge and powder, of hoops and wigs, of stiff manners, rigid proprieties, narrow society, and cold impulses, had indescribable trouble in struggling ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... yielding and changing under the breath of thought and feeling as a field of flowers when the west wind blows, was now set, as though for ever, in a death-like fixity. The delicate features were drawn and pinched, the nostrils contracted, the colourless lips straightened out of the lines of beauty into the mould of a lifeless mask. It was the face of a dead woman, but it was her face still, and the Wanderer knew it well; in the kingdom of his soul the whole resistless commonwealth of the emotions revolted together to dethrone ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... proceeding from the rock; it is of the tenderest, most transparent, pale blue and green, and resembles the reflection of a Bengal flame. But what is most strange is, that this play of colour proceeds from the rock, and only extends eight to ten inches from it, while the other water is colourless as common water, only more ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer |
